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Who's Next is the flotsam of the disastrous Lifehouse project, which Peter Townshend envisioned as a live-recorded concept album with the vital statistics of audience members fed into the controller of an early ARP analog synthesizer to create continuo tracks for the music. (Lifehouse is alternatively described as a scripted film project, without any of the spontaneity implicit in the previous description.) The project proved to be intractable on several levels, caused a great falling out between Townshend and The Who's producer Kit Lambert, and as described in his own words in the liner notes to the remastered Who's Next CD, led Townshend to the verge of a suicidal nervous breakdown.
After recording some of the Lifehouse tracks in New York and then falling out with producer Kit Lambert, The Who went back into the studio with producer Glyn Johns and started over. The recent publication of some of the New York recordings as extra tracks on the remastered CD show that Johns deserves a great deal of credit for the quality of the album. A number of Townshend's Lifehouse demo recordings have also been published, giving an rare view of the evolution of the songs and sounds that went into a classic album.
The music features a wall of sound arrangement. The album also fortuitously fell at a time when great advances had been made in sound engineering over the previous decade, and also shortly after the introduction of music synthesizers. The result was a sound that was absolutely stunning at the time, and unlike anything that had been heard before (although disliked by many traditional Who fans of the time). However, as full and brash as the sound is on most of the album there are contrasts with finger-picked acoustic guitar, and Roger Daltrey's swaggering vocals alternate with quieter introspective moments.
One way Townshend "played" the ARP synthesizer was essentially a matter of programming it to produce pulsing patterns, and in that mode it was used to create continuo parts for two of the most notable songs on the album, "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again". (This has been disputed recently, suggesting that Pete may have used a Lowrey home organ. For more information, visit Rich Rowley's site.) Elsewhere Townshend used the synthesizer in a more delicate role, as in the introductory notes to "Bargain", or as a playful noisemaker, sounding almost like a boiling teapot on "The Song is Over". Townshend also used an envelope follower to modulate the spectrum of his guitar on "Going Mobile", giving it a distinctive squawking sound that degenerates into a bubbling noise at the end of the song. (Townshend had previously experimented with recordings played backwards as a sort of ad hoc synthesizer in one song on Tommy, and the band's playful use of sounds had shown up earlier when they sang a chorus of "Cello, cello, cello" when the could not afford a real string section for their mini-opera "A Quick One While He's Away".)
The album also features piano by Nicky Hopkins and a violin solo by Dave Arbus on "Baba O'Riley".
The album cover shows a photograph of the band having just urinated on a large concrete piling protruding from a heap of mining refuse; the photo seems to be a reference to the monolith discovered on the moon in the film , which had been released only about three years earlier. This 'monumental' disrespect may also, like the album's title, be symbolic of the band's refusal to spend the rest of their career playing Tommy.
The featured urinal was actually at the Easington District Collliery in County Durham.
An earlier cover design had featured photos of grotesquely obese nude females and has been published elsewhere, but never actually appeared on the album. An alternate cover featured drummer Keith Moon dressed in black lingerie, holding a leather whip, and wearing a blonde wigFor an article on stock index see WIG, for the Wing In Ground effect see Ground effect. A wig or toupee is a head of hair human, horse-hair or synthetic worn on the head for fashion or various other aesthetic and stylistic reasons, including cultural and (this image can be found behind the CD tray in the remastered version).